Friday, January 31, 2014

Dictate your reports - a new option

I've been thinking of dictating my reports for a long time. Those of us who do it say that it speeds up the work. But somehow, I have never got around to buying Dragon Dictate, teaching it to understand my accented English and learning how to dictate, which is a skill in itself.

It seems that there is a new and free option for doing that for Mac users (with thanks to Les Posen, who sent the information in his email). If you have the new operating system (Maverics, free update from the app store), it includes a nice dictation software. Tap the fcn key twice, wherever you are, and you are ready to dictate.

The thing worked quite nicely, translating my accented English into good typing. It was even able to transcribe 'neuropsychology', neuropsychologist' and 'frontal lobes' correctly. It was a shame that temporal lobe ended up being a 'love', and it had some unusual ideas about 'stroke', but it is a good start.

Importantly, you can download extra software and all the transcription happens on your Mac, with no information being sent to the server - a good feature for ensuring privacy.